Alone Together studies the pervasiveness of emotions in fourteenth- and (primarily) fifteenth-century courtly literature of the Iberian Peninsula. As Henry Berlin ponders in the introduction, the study of emotions in the late Middle Ages is a complex field that eludes a systematic approach based on either the superposition of premodern theories of emotion, affect, and sentiment, or the basis of modern psychological concepts. Berlin thus begins his book by arguing for the use of a concept that aptly focuses his discussion. He chooses passion as the most productive, one that is rooted in the thought of the period, that can be identified in a variety of works drawing on Aristotelian and Stoic ideas of emotion, that is present, too, in rhetorical works, and that enjoys well-recognized ethical, political, and devotional uses. For Berlin, the passions of late medieval Iberian texts are not just innocuous themes around which courtiers exercised their...
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